Publication: Celebrating the devastating brilliance of Art Speigelman's Maus

You don’t get many bookshelves that are without a copy of Art Spiegelman’s legendary Maus; sometimes legendary gets bandied about a bit much (especially by us!) but we genuinely believe this book is a cornerstone of 21st Century literature.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was part of our It’s Mice That takeover on April Fools’ Day 2014. You can read our explanation post here or peruse the mice archive here.

Art Spiegelman, together with his wife Françoise Mouly the art director of The New Yorker, printed their own magazine RAW back in the 1980s. It aimed to champion cartoonists and authors who used images to tell their stories and_Maus_ popped up as a regular feature in RAW. In 1986, Art collated them to form a novel in their own right.

To cut a long and oft-told story short, the book is a collection of short comics that illustrate the stories Art Spiegelman’s father told him about the Second World War and, in particular, the Holocaust. In Art’s story, the Jews are represented as mice and the Germans are mean-looking cats. It’s a moving, exceptionally well-drawn account of the war that has thrown a very different kind of light on tales from that time as well as evoking a tight family vibe that makes you want to call your folks immediately. Shall I start getting into how important it was for the world of illustration and graphic novels? I do not have the time, and never will. Find out for yourself by getting your hands on a copy immediately or at the very least dig out and re-read your own.